Ephemerality
by lydiamaartin
Summary: Unbrokenness, like time, is fleeting. - Harry and Ginny, after the war.


**disclaimer: don't own what you recognize.**

**warnings: second-person, au after the final battle, darker than the book's version of harry, struggles with ptsd.**

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><p>He drinks a lot these days. Spends his days at muggle bars, sitting on stools and letting the world slip past him as he buys himself drink after drink, every kind you can imagine. Vodka, whiskey, rum, gin, all poured down his throat like nothing really matters and (maybe nothing does).<p>

You watch him, growing old, and wonder where it all went so wrong.

It was supposed to be such an easy happy ending, so simple, so perfect. But there is nothing easy about war, nothing simple, and nothing even close to perfect. You had to learn that the hard way, had to grow up _fastfastfast_ in this mad world — and so did he.

And because he is who he is, and you are who you are, you let him. Let him grow, up and old, without you, because there's so little you can do to heal him, so very little you can do to make his world spin the right way again.

You'd like to pretend you can do anything, can do everything, can bring him back from this spiral, but you can't. You're a little girl, broken and bloodied, damaged from a war that you never should have fought in, and he's the hero who shouldn't have had to be one. You're Ginny, he's Harry, and you _can't._

It hurts almost as much as the war had. Helplessness is not a feeling you're accustomed to, and so you deal with it in a way you're not accustomed to.

You move out, fast, far too fast, leave them all behind to grow old without you because there's a lot you can't do, and helping Harry is only the beginning of that list. You can't, you can't, you can't.

What you can do is find yourself a job in Muggle London and buy a flat in the heart of the city. London is vast, is big and crowded, polluted and noisy, horrible and beautiful at the same time. London is everything to you, lost and alone in this big, big world, because it is something normal to hold onto when everything you'd ever held to be true is gone.

You smoke. More than you should. It's relaxing, leaning on the balcony of your tiny flat and letting smoke ribbon out into the endless skies above, grey twining into grey, lost in the labyrinth of the world's limits. It's peaceful, calming, and it makes it _so_ easy to forget everything you've left behind.

Letters reach you, occasionally. Your family stopped sending owls after a few months, but sometimes there is one awaiting you in the muggle mailbox. Mostly from Hermione; she's the only one who knows how to work the muggle mail system, and Ron, by extension.

You reply, sometimes. Only when you're tired of smoking, tired of pretending, tired of running. Only when your mind starts drifting, wondering, wishing — _where's Harry_? And does he ever think of you?

News of Harry is scarce, though, even from his best friends. You know that they, of all people, know where his new house, his hideout from the world, is, but they refuse to tell. All they can tell you is the names of the bars where he was spotted by the paparazzi recently.

All they can tell you is _Harry's fine_ and _don't worry_ and _when will you come home, Ginny?_

It's almost funny, how time drifts so easily in this endless loop of letters and smoke and working. Of waiting on people who have somewhere better to be, people waiting on them, lives to live. To live. To live. _To live._

What do you have to live for? you start wondering, but, oh, that's too dangerous a path to go on.

Time is lost, time is fleeting, and you do not have time to think about the war that killed the girl you were without actually killing you. You do not have time to think of what a lonely, broken girl that war has left behind. And you do not have time to be mad, not when there are tables to serve and people to wait on and cigarettes to smoke.

You figure, one day you'll go back and everything will be normal again. That's the thing about running away from your past — it keeps that seed of hope growing because you can never truly escape the demons of your past, and so maybe, whispers a traitorous little voice in your head, maybe you can overcome them.

Overcoming demons is for the brave, though, and you might be a Gryffindor, but you are hardly brave.

So you work, you wait, you get a promotion, you smoke. You don't make friends because nobody cares to talk to the girl with a broken heart in her eyes. Nobody cares because nobody knows. Isn't that the way it's always been?

You smoke, more often, too often, and one day, he finds you.

"Ginny," and he's _in your house_, on your balcony, looking at you with those eyes of emerald that you could write a thousand pages of poetry on but you won't. You won't. You can't.

It might have been a sweeter reunion, if you hadn't been so surprised, hadn't been knocked breathless at the force of this reminder of everything you've been running from – green light and death and a wall collapsing and screams and blood and _so many screams_. Your nightmares don't stop when the sun rises.

So instead of running into his arms as if you were something out of a fairytale, you stub out your cigarette and ask him, "Are you supposed to kiss me now?"

He smiles, almost. _Almost_, but it's close, and suddenly you realize that he is neither drunk nor hungover. That he seems almost normal, almost sane, almost unbroken again.

But unbrokenness, like time, is fleeting, and you should know that. He should know that. You all know that.

"I missed you," as if you'd just gone for a trip, as if you two hadn't fought on the frontlines of a war and _god_, you want to kiss him. But this isn't a happy ending and this isn't a love story. This is only the epilogue to a war, only the reunion of two broken soldiers who should never have fought in the first place, and those are hardly happy. You know that.

"Missed you, too," you say, but you don't move and neither does he, and for one moment, everything is still.

He breaks the silence. "I love you," and you smile.

"Love you, too," but even love is fleeting.

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><p><strong>an: um. sorry, i'm not sure what this is, but i suppose it's what comes out when i'm tired and it's late and i'm in the mood to write angst. you can take the ending whichever way you want.  
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**please review?  
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**and don't favorite without reviewing, please and thank you.**


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